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So, we're flipping back to Haruwin this week - expect the stories to continue alternating without clear logic to which shows up in your inbox :-) To bring you up to speed - the story is set in a reality where the Selk'nam tribe at the southern tip of South America has survived to become a modern nation called the "Great Haruwin". Our protagonist is Praxedes Nam Chon, a grad student in History who serves as the resident assistant in the dormitories of her university and spends her free time playing an online history game called "PM2". Last submission, her night was interrupted by a mysterious figure named Adah who moved in a new student out of schedule. The next morning, Praxedes found the new girl, Anna, to be rebellious, disoriented, and unsure where she was. The chapter ended with Anna revealing that she also plays PM2, but claimed to have the same screen name as Praxedes. We pick up mid-chapter to finish off their conversation and see what's going on - and then things get even weirder. Interested to see what you all think. Quick note if you catch it that yes, Anna's last name has been slightly changed from Malihi to Malinski for reasons that become apparent in the text.

Due to some of the positive feedback on got on this one, I decided to stick with it for another week - although "Millenial Reign" is definitely coming back next week, as this one needs more time to marinate and I've had enough of a break to get back to the main project. Anyway, last week you met two grad students (Praxedes and Tacitus) researching history in a trippy alternate reality where the Selk'nam tribe in South America has survived to become a prosperous modern nation (the gag being that their reality was created by a wiki-based internet game). This week I did a little more "concept art". It's not directly after the last scene but close, and I'm submitting it to get thoughts on whether you like this direction as a potential plot. I've gotten feedback both in the direction of acknowledging the constructed nature of this world and playing it off the real one (which is what I do here), but also suggestions that I just stay inside the world and use it for social satire. This probably isn't my best work, but I do like the "Adah" sequence and it gets me where I'm going. I definitely would appreciate input if anyone has thoughts on how to portray chatroom conversations and online activity without being clunky. That was a struggle here.

Hello all, "Millenial Reign" will return next week, but in it's absence I wanted your thoughts on a setting I'm experimenting with. This is a beginning - not sure for what or for how long of a piece - it's concept art essentially. Mostly I'm interested in comments on how you think the setting works - it's drawn from a text-based free-form roleplaying game I was involved in on an Alternate History Wiki last year. And it got me thinking about the morality and ethics of authors engaging their characters (or in this case entire nations) wars, genocides and the like - and I wanted to write a worm's eye view from the "real" people who had to deal with our crap. How do children of such capricious gods perceive their own existence? It's an alternate present based off a deviation point about six-hundred years ago, and I'm not even bothering trying to make it plausible (it's inherently implausible) - but I'm wondering what people would make of themselves in such a fundamentally twisted world. Most of the details of the worldbuilding are so strange because the history was crowdsourced, so I'm interested to see if it works, or if it's just nuts. That, and suggestions on where to go. I don't know what happens next - at least not for Tacitus and Praxedes - don't know whether it's going to be dramatic, or how long the end piece will be.